Yr5 Discover Robotics

Year 5 are just taking their first steps into the wonderful world of robotics and programming. And it wasn't just the kids who were exploring this for the first time - it's new to some of the teachers too. "I was more than a little apprehensive" admitted one teacher. But these fears soon disappeared, as once again the kids leap in and get on with it. By the end of their first session, they were not only programming the devices to travel around a prescribed route, they also used sensors to detect and avoid obstacles. The robot above was able to zoom along the table top and brake hard as it sensed the edge - stopping every time, with millimetres to spare.

Isn't it great how kids pick new skills up so quickly and once they enthused and excited by something, they'll run with it, often going beyond our expectations. I'm looking forward to seeing what they eventually come up with as they move through their project.

Photo Editing

Having a digital camera (iPad) to hand all day has many advantages (see previous post), but the majority of photos taken are merely 'snap-shots' - functional but not necessarily creative. Year 7 have been learning how to improve the photos they take. So far this has been achieved in two ways.

1. Take a better picture.
To achieve this they have learned about the way a camera works and how the image is captured. An understanding of shutter speed, light levels, metering etc is essential in understanding the limitations of your device, and also guiding your decisions when choosing location, angle, light etc.

2. Edit to enhance
While we've not gone overly creative just yet, students are now using editing tools to make their good pictures better. This could involve changes to brightness, contrast, colour correction, lifting shadows and cropping. Some of these adjustments could be very subtle, with minor enhancements being made.

Occasionally we can go a little bit beyond enhancement, and move more towards transformation of the image. The example below shows how one fairly ordinary image can become quite striking with just a few simple edits. The majority of students edit directly on their iPad, using either the iPhoto or PicShop apps.

iPad Camera

The camera is one feature of the iPad that we so often take for granted. We know it's there and we use it quite regularly. Teachers and learners take photos of their writing in books, collaborative work, artwork and even the information on the whiteboard.  Videos too are being taken to record learning, practice a language, or document an achievement. On just one day this week I saw students videoing a conversation in Spanish, making a stop-frame animation, and recording themselves 'perform' a project. To have this facility in your hand, to use at a moment's notice, is extremely powerful.

Today I showed my class or 12-yr-olds a roll of Kodak 35mm film. The majority had no idea what it was. Somehow it didn't really surprise me. I remember resisting digital photography for as long as I could, but even I had pretty much stopped using film when these kids were only 3! They have never known anything else.

The ubiquity of their iPad camera hit me the other day when my class came back from Science and told me how they'd used microscopes to look at onion cells. When I asked about it they said, "Here, take a look". Without being prompted by their Science teacher (in fact he hadn't even thought of it), the kids took pictures looking down the microscope. And they were surprisingly good too. To them, it was a perfectly natural thing to do...see something cool, save it and share it. And share it they did. Many showed their parents that evening, several blogged it, and one or two appeared on the ever popular Instagram.

This one was taken by Jason.

Learning Live - Orchard Project

Our Orchard Group were invited to attend the FOBISSEA Leadership Conference in Penang at the weekend to run a Learning Live session. They rose to the challenge of sharing their views and ideas with the leaders of some of the top international schools across SE Asia. They impressed a very difficult audience with their passion and subject knowledge, and engaged the delegates in important conversations about their learning. Check out the video to see what happened.

Tales of the Unexpected

Sometimes kids surprise us. They often demonstrate the ability to see tasks from a different perspective or they have ideas that we as adults/teachers had not considered. This especially so when it comes to technology.

An example of this happen just happened in a library lesson. The students were in small groups and had been given the task of reading the same book. They then had to summarise the story in the form of a Rap. Our Teacher Librarian expected a set of lyrics that would hopefully be performed with a few finger-click or hand-claps as accompaniment. The result was somewhat different. As the lyrics were being written, many students turned to their iPads for inspiration, and the phrase "There's an app for that" proved itself to be true once again. In the week that Apple announced that there are over 1 million apps available for iPad, it's not surprising really that there are a whole host of useful apps for Rap writers & performers.

The student's creativity shone through, with the support of the right technology to improve the whole process. I can't wait to see what results they come up with next week.

Orchards Project

Get up early on a Sunday morning, come in to school & spend the day working hard with fellow students from across three year groups. Who would do that? A very enthusiastic and dedicated bunch of students, that's who.

Or maybe they are less 'Student' and more "Learner'. This was one of the concepts we explored as we began the first steps on our new & innovative Orchard Project. The team who are driving this exciting project are: Naomi, Nicolai, Daniel, Farah, Manett, Kelvin, Josh, Mei, Han-Yi, Shunna, Irene, Megan, & Melissa. 

Learner or Student?

The Orchards Project is an innovation being implemented by Apple Distinguished Educators in 3 countries - Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. The students involved will become advocates - showcasing, modeling and speaking out with a credible voice - to help schools create and articulate a vision for connected, personalised learning.

The Orchards Project aims to create frameworks which will help schools to effectively engage learners and teacher-learners in an exploration of how technology tools can personalise learning, and how to better design learning experiences and spaces which connect to the lives young people live. This may include:

- working with ADEs within their country to create and publish examples of participatory, production-centred learning

- helping teachers to design learning experiences and spaces which connect to the lives young people live

- helping teachers to understand how technology tools can personalise learning working with schools to test the infrastructure requirements necessary to support connected and personalised learning models (network access, appropriate productivity apps, appropriate communication & storage environments, etc).

The KL Orchard Group

There is hope that some members of the Orchard group in each of the three countries will showcase their learning in a live studio at regional conferences this term. For the Singapore Orchard Group this means participating in Learning 2.013; for the Malaysia Orchard Group this involves participating in the FOBISSEA Leadership Conference; and the Thailand Orchard Group will take part in the EARCOS Leadership Conference.

More Global Connections

 

The children in Yr2 have been learning about 'Our Wonderful World', and this gave them an ideal opportunity to connect with other children around the world.

When I popped into their class they were chatting with children in a small international school in a very remote part of Russia (on an island in fact). They were able to share stories about their lives and identified the many ways in which they were just the same. Other aspects of our lives were also very different, and the children were all very curious about some of these.